The Eldritch Cases: Dagon is an embellished adaptation of Humbert Percival Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth, although it might be more accurate to say it’s a mash-up of some of his most popular works. Herbert West will make an appearance as the villain, for example, and some of Pickman’s models might well show up. For those who enjoyed Dark Corners Of The Earth until it started shooting from the hip a little too often, Eldritch Cases has the advantage of being a point and click game. In a genre not known for gunplay and panicked escape sequences, it’s fair to expect a greater emphasis on investigation and puzzling, although that could well mean reconstructing cuneiform tablets via the medium of sliding block puzzles. Let’s hope not!

I didn’t mention that The Eldritch Cases are currently confined to Kickstarter. With less than half of its £20,000 target currently pledged and 18 days left on the clock, a determined push is needed to cross the finishing line. A tenner for the game DRM free, with a Steam key supplied should the Greenlight process succeed, seems fair and while the video isn’t the most thrilling pitch I’ve ever seen, I do like the music.

With two playable characters, a prohibition agent and a nurse, the game has more than a hint of Broken Sword about it and developer Thomas Busse acknowledges that. Scratches, Gabriel Knight and Silent Hill also receive a namecheck. Seems like good company to keep.

I actually thought it was more the escape sequence that ruined that game for me. From that point onwards the game goes from being an interesting stealthy adventure to a really hard shooter… Or at least it does for long enough that I can’t play it past that point, because I can’t get past it! They hooked me with the prelude chapter and then alienated me with the shooty fishmen.

I think you’re misremembering – the panicked escape sequence was the *start* of the stealth game proper, everything up to that was scene setting and investigation, with a few shorter hidey-searchy sections. It’s not until after a very lengthy tense sneak-through-town that the protagonist finds a gun.

If you watch Stuart Gordon’s movie adaptation of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth”, titled “Dagon”, it’s clear that the whole hotel sequence (and a few other sections) of the game were modeled on the movie, and the execution of that scene in particular is fantastic. I played the game before seeing the film though, and the idea that I could move stuff around to delay my pursuers was thrilling – even if it turned out to be a setpiece with no alternate routes or choices.

The game was really deeply flawed but there’s so much in it that I love, like being able to find each fishman that you sense watching, or the way that the breathing audio and vertigo works against the player.

Having finished the game, I also think that the idea that it’s a shooter is a fallacy. I have never finished it by playing it as a shooter. It’s balanced to be a stealth game – just like Thief, MGS or Hitman, getting into combat is risky and should be avoided at all costs, and if you have to take down an enemy you’d better be able to do it quickly and quietly or you’re in a lot of trouble.

There *are* enemies that you have to kill, and some that it’s easier if you kill, but there aren’t enough bullets to kill everyone and it’d take a long time to knife them all.

The stealth is hard as well, however. No excuses for that – ymmv – but I found parts of it very tense and atmospheric and other parts frustrating.

I think you misunderstood me, when I said it was an interesting stealthy adventure. I meant that I was enjoying the game as an adventure game with a few stealth mechanics thrown in, not as a stealth game.

Like you said, this was really just the intro, and then the pace of the game picks up and the gameplay changes.

That was the entirety of the problem for me, I didn’t enjoy the gameplay from that point onwards. I didn’t want to play a Hitman, or even a Theif, I wanted to play something with puzzles and investigation and a slowly creeping sense of horror.

Of course you can’t do the plot of Shadow over Innsmouth without a certain amount of running around with fishmen after you, but there was no need to make it so hard or so different from the first part of the game. The bit where you’re running through the inn locking doors behind you is a trial and error action sequence where you not only have to know what to do at each moment but have to do it very quickly or it’s instant death.

They just lost me at that point. I’m not arguing that it was a bad game or trying to reduce it to a shooter. Personally I didn’t notice a single bug either!

I played this on the original Xbox, so can’t comment on any bugs in the PC version (which, I’m assuming is what you’re referring to?), but the biggest issue I had with that sequence is that the button to close the door bolts and to open the door are the same – so half the time you would be opening the door for your pursuers, rather than bolting it shut on them instead. Very aggravating.

Heh, yeah I got that. My comment was not a criticism on your statement. It’s just that most of Lovecraft’s work doesn’t actually feature anything so action-packed. So they picked practically the only story of his in which an escape sequence should occur to make a p&c adventure out of. Hence my smiling at the irony. :-)

Cthulhu had a boat driven through his head, back before he became too famous to meet such defeat. Lovecraft isn’t a complete stranger to action, it is just that things generally end badly no matter what you try. Escape just means you live to go insane or to continue to be hunted by some entity.

I remember reading a Cuthulhu comic adaption with this very scene. A mad captain ramming the great old one with his boat. But that is all i remember, at least i now know that this very thing existed and wasn’t a fever dream of mine. Might you tell me the name of that particular story?

I figured it was in jest, but knowing it was incorrect I felt compelled to let everyone know what HP actually stands for.

When I think of HP Lovecraft, I also think of Hewlett Packard and HP sauce. We’ve seen some odd PR stunts, like Azeroth Choppers and yet there has never been anything of that kind with HP Lovecraft. There are Cthulhu plushies and stuff, but no HP Lovecraft Sauce or Hewlett Packard Lovecraft computers. No “Cthulhu approved” products of any kind, as far as I know.

I’d love some more Lovecraft-ian games, rather than more Warcraft games, so I say: Make Lovecraft, Not Warcraft.

It’s not exactly a QTE, but there was this terrifying escape-through-a-maze-while-an-indescribable-eldritch-horror-pursues-you sequence near the end of the old classic Shadow of the Comet that worked pretty well.

Not dead which eternal lie
Stranger eons Death may die
Drain you of your sanity
Face The Thing That Should Not Be

Looks ok but I wish someone would make a violent action lovecraftian game where tentacles and limbs can be disarticulated. Also humans are boring let make one where you can be Cthulu or Nytholotep and eat a city!

Most of what goes wrong with Lovecraft derivatives is they try to give a visual representation to aliens/elder gods/beings (whatever you want to call them that in the stories just the sight of drives the protagonist/characters mad, not to mention the non-euclidean geometry…

Not to say there haven’t been some damn fine efforts done in games and film though. Nothing has yet to fully carry over that sense of dread his writing conveys though.

That is a brilliant game, and yes it has the classic Lovecraftian not only “out of body” but “out of context” dream experience. Most of the games I’ve played that wear their influence on their sleeves take the “there are scary things about and you have a sanity meter” approach.

Well there’s obviously Call of Cthulhu (damn bugs and gun segments), Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, Eldritch, The original AVP games to a degree, The Thing, I Have No Mouth and Must Scream and a bunch more that are obviously inspired by Lovecraft to a certain degree (hell DOOM and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. come to mind as well as the original Quake)

A pretty decent list but you forgot the original Alone in the Dark, the most Lovecrafty of all games, especially if you read all the books. It’s also a pretty fair bet that whoever designed the Daedra in the Elder Scrolls series (visually and conceptually) has read their fair share of HPL.

Also, have you read the original short story of I Have no Mouth? The author reworked it quite a bit for the game. I suppose if there’s a Lovecraft connection there, then by extension System Shock (Shodan is the bastard lovechild of AM and HAL) has one too.

The top picture makes it look like the Mythos is being investigated by Agent 47, and while I’m sure that’s not what the actual game is, I can’t help but imagine how brilliant/terrible such a thing might be.

“Hmm, you don’t look a thing like my incestuous, ichthyophilic demonspawn brethren but since you are wearing their pair of bathing shorts, I guess you must be alright to see the grandmaster of the esoteric order of dagon.”

You are a tiny worthless fleshy blob amidst a vast indifferent universe of chaos and horror, far beyond your comprehension. In fact don’t even try to comprehend it, because the only thing defending your fragile existence as you know it, is your own ignorance. Don’t even try to understand the nature of your own species too well, because there is far more evil there than good.

Would be better.

Not very Hollywood-y though is it? I mean, who can eat popcorn to that?

Does anyone here remember “Shadow of the Comet” ?
One of the earlier Lovecraft-Games.Not a great adventure game, but it really packed some atmosphere.
There still was an older Game called “Hound of Shadows”, but I only knew that one, from the reviews in the magazines.

Lovecraft’s recent popularity is almost entirely down to the recent expiry of copyright on several of his works. I wonder what the deal with Tesla is? When I was a kid it was Edison who had all the geekcred.